A little old man hobbles out of his house in a tizzy. His mailbox had just been knocked over by a child. The child, a thirty-something-year-old construction worker was just doing what he was told.
“What’s the big idea?” screamed the senior in delirium.
The young man just stood there, not sure how to respond to something clearly blown out of proportion. The foreman noticed what was happening across the yard and came over to help his younger employee.
The foreman delivered his canned speech about progress and growth to the old man, hoping to help the situation and ease the old man’s thoughts for the sake of being able to go back to work. The foreman shared his version of the bigger idea in order to overshadow the old man’s small idea. The apartment complex took over the cottage.
You have all heard a story like this before. It might even be inspired by the movie UP. This concept of “out with the old, in with the new” has been around for a while. Depending on what time period you want to focus on, this idea of progression was either the way to fame or flame. Aristotle supplanted his teacher Plato, yet Galileo was placed on house arrest for trying to supplant Aristotle. Giordano Bruno was even burned for some of his ideas and beliefs tangential to Copernicus. Ideas have power. Words can unite the world. The dictionary can end a dynasty.
Before the internet and phones, there were these things called letters. People would send them the world over so that they could communicate to other people not in their towns. Scholars often used them to have conversations with other scholars. Letters were a pretty safe way to transmit ideas because the common man couldn’t read them. It was like everything was written in a code that only the select few could decipher. These messages were often discussing the ideas of the men that came before them. While these men often worked in isolation within their cities, they had a network of people in the present and the past that they could relate to. Today, we are blessed with the means to decode their work and see what they talked about. We can see the progression of their thoughts. One man spent a lot of time looking through the books and drawing out ideas that all the great thinkers of the past spent time discussing. This man was Mortimer Adler, and he called this progression of thought the Great Conversation.
Adler’s work was not particularly new or novel, but the way that he described it and packaged it in his time has given us some great verbiage to hang our thoughts upon. Looking through the great books of his time, he noticed that there were 102 great ideas that kept coming up in the texts. Ideas that mattered. Curiously, he noticed these ideas changed and morphed as history went on in ways that changed how men lived and interacted with each other. In each generation, the way that life was lived out changed based upon the understanding of these ideas. Ideas like beauty, being, chance, courage, liberty, law, prudence, punishment, relation, religion, time, truth, wealth, and wisdom. To see a boring-looking full list of these ideas, you can find them here (Sorry I couldn’t find a better list online without getting a lot of commentary on them). Adler wrote an essay on each idea, how they changed through history, and the authors that influenced each one. It is important to realize that the way that one thinks about each of these ideas change how one will live out their life.
It is a study within itself to see how that these ideas have changed through history. The best way that I can show you this is to take an idea and trace it’s metamorphosis through time. One of my favorites to look at in class is virtue. Virtue is a vital term to understand when one comes to the study of Plato and Aristotle. I could make the argument that it is the key term to Platonism and Aristotelianism, which were the key and contrary worldviews for 2000 years after their lives. The word that is translated in English for virtue is the Greek word “arete.” In the context of the writings of Plato and Aristotle, arete meant excellence or perfection within an action or pursuit. A famous example from Aristotle is that of a chair. There is a virtue within chairs that we have here on earth that is “chair-ness”, and it is how we know that the thing is a chair. A chair is meant for sitting. So, as a thing is made best to be sat upon would be the measure of its “chair-ness.” This is interesting when one considers man. We often think that man is made up of a conglomeration of virtues, but to Aristotle, this was not so. There is a virtue that is man. The virtue that is man is made up of other virtues that we common think of like courage.
The reason that arete is vital to understand these ancient worldviews is because Plato saw that arete was contained within a spiritual ideal that is up in heaven within an entity that became known as “The One.” It was man’s pursuit in life to learn and understand the metaphysical ideals that were above in order to know how better to live down below. Aristotle saw things inversely. He believed that arete was contained within the things of earth and man could understand them personally. We could understand what made something a good chair and judge things accordingly.
An interesting note is the arete would have been used for good and bad things. There was an arete of bravery and cowardice. Plato would see things in opposition or diametrically, where Aristotle saw things within a balance that became known as the “golden mean”. For a soldier, there was the fearless, courageous, and the fearful virtue. It is not good for a soldier to have the virtue of fearlessness because one would attack when they would lose. It is bad for a soldier to have the virtue of fearfulness because they would not attack when they could win. A good soldier knows his own strength and the strength of his opponent, so he knows when it is best to attack or to retreat. This would be the courageous soldier. Life, to Aristotle, was meant to be lived within the mean.
With the rise of the church and the Latin language in all things academic, “arete” was translated in Plato and Aristotle into “virtus”, which is where we get our English word “virtue.” Fairly quickly, the church spilt the word into two words: virtue and vice. Virtue would take on the positive nature while vice is the negative. The church would see virtues within the person of Christ while vices are the things of this world or the flesh. You can see that the idea of “virtue” actually became smaller during the time of the church. This led to a natural duality of the world which played into Platonism. Augustine is one who saw the world in this way, and I would put this fault in the thinking of the church on him. Within the Confessions, I believe in Book 8 if my memory serves me right, is when Augustine read John 1, and he saw the teachings of Plotinus, who was a Neoplatonist philosopher.
Augustine’s understanding of the relation between the physical and spiritual realm stayed in the church at least until the Reformation. Interestingly, the Scientific Revolution is what freed man’s thinking of these incorrect thoughts. It is interesting how the Reformation freed men to think for themselves which led to the Scientific Revolution which freed men to a more true understanding of the relation of the spiritual and physical world. It is almost like man has to continue to reform their thinking on everything.
The Scientific Revolution led to the Moderns and their views that virtue is what is pragmatic to life. So, one does good in order to get ahead in life or to feel good about oneself. If no one were to know about a good action, it would not be worth doing unless it personally made you feel better about yourself. This led to the postmodern view of virtue which is virtue is what an individual makes of it. What I see as good and what you see as good can be different, yet they are both valid because how can we definitively prove that one “good” is better than another’s “good.” There is no outside standard for man to compare himself against.
Hopefully this trip down virtue’s memory lane was helpful for you to see how words change through time and these changes have real impact upon our daily lives. It is important to see these changes in order to understand ourselves, our time, and what we are to do with the life that is given to us.
This is why it is vital that you care about these great ideas. The world is looking for its next thing after postmodernism. It only leads to chaos and people are getting disillusioned with the twinkle of “freedom” that it once promised. The twinkle was revealed to be cheap tin. There is nothing behind the shimmer. Freedom from all standards is actually destroying life as we know it. The battle is here. We can see it when the world does not understand the clear distinction between what marriage is, boys and girls, and morality. These are real things that we are dealing with now. These are things that are being taught in schools and that legislators are making laws about. The battle is here for us. We are about 30 years too late to the fight to not have it happen. The fight is here for us now. Doug Wilson likes to put it as a battle over the dictionary. While that seems anticlimactic or nerdy, it is very true. The battle is over words. We have to know and understand the history behind how our thoughts got here in order to engage with them meaningfully.
There are two main things that we have to do now in this fight. The first is education. We must educate ourselves for this fight. People are looking for leaders all around us. When Biden and Trump are the best that our nation has to offer in terms of leaders, something has seriously gone awry. We need something better than this. We cannot wait for our children to grow up and take on this fight for us. We must start with ourselves. In doing so, we should train up our kids in what we are learning. If they can read, they can engage with these ideas. If you have a 4th grader or above, there is a very good chance that they can engage better with these ideas than you can because they have been devoting more active time recently to the exercise of learning that you have in a long time. For example, most adults have taken Algebra 2 in their life, but if they were to have to teach their children how to do it, good luck. So, teach and engage your kids as you learn. Read the books that they are reading. Listen to them on your drives. Talk about these ideas over dinner. Take an idea, think about all the times you have heard in referenced and how the idea has changed or why they brought it up. Movies are a great place to start for most of us. Consider the idea “knowledge” with the movies The Matrix and Inception. What are these movies telling you about the things that we know?
The other place that we have to fight is in politics. The time to vote in silence as passed. It is time to lead the charge in our society. If we believe that Jesus is Lord and claims all things as His, then who are we to step down from His fight in the public square? The world is crying out for leaders. Someone has to be the one to step up. If someone who knows better isn’t stepping up, then the unqualified will. As it is said, all it takes for evil to win is for good men to do nothing.